Date: Monday, Aug 18th, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM Central Time
Location: Zoom
Title: “AI agents for biomedicine”
Abstract: AI agents—large language models equipped with tools and reasoning capabilities—are emerging as powerful research enablers. This talk will explore how biomedicine is particularly well-positioned to benefit from rapid advances in agentic AI. I’ll first introduce the Virtual Lab—a collaborative team of AI scientist agents conducting in silico research meetings to tackle open-ended research projects. As an example application, the Virtual Lab designed new nanobody binders to recent Covid variants that we experimentally validated. Then I will present our works on improving the visual reasoning abilities of agents on medical images and videos.
Bio: James Zou is an associate professor of Biomedical Data Science, CS and EE at Stanford University. He works on developing cutting-edge AI for biomedical applications. His group developed many widely used innovations including EchoNet AI (FDA cleared for assessing cardiac function), Gradio (used by over a million developers), and SyntheMol (NY Times 2024 Good Tech). He has received a Sloan Fellowship, the Overton Prize, an NSF CAREER Award, two Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator Awards, a Top Ten Clinical Achievement Award, best paper awards at ICML and other AI conferences, and faculty awards from Google, Amazon, Adobe and Apple.